Inducing Trust in Blockchain-enabled IoT Marketplaces Through Reputation and Dispute Resolution

In order for the metaverse to achieve its full potential, access to data from the physical world is required. The Internet of Things is a potential data provider, but a widely adopted marketplace to enable data monetization and trade with the metaverse does not yet exist. One of the reasons is the level of trust between the participants regarding the integrity of the exchanged data. In this paper, a reputation system is proposed that aims to alleviate this problem by providing a mechanism to ensure the validity of the traded data. Under this system, every seller is assigned a score, which buyers can use later to make informed decisions while ensuring it is economically disadvantageous for illicit actors to manipulate the scores. A dispute resolution scheme is also presented that acts as a fail-safe mechanism to further establish trust in this system, along with a proof-of-concept prototype of the proposed reputation system. Empirical results in this paper show the feasibility of the proposed system and provide insight in its behaviour with respect to its parameters.